Barbara Kingsolver said she wrote three or four drafts of her new book, "The Lacuna," before she settled on the form of the first chapter.

"I really struggled," she said. "It's so hard for a reader to stick with you for the first 30 or 40 pages, to go on the journey with you."

Any of her fans and no doubt a cadre of new readers will be glad to take the journey with Harrison Shepherd, the man with a common name who lives a very uncommon life in two countries during the heart of the 20th century.

In her first novel in nine years, Kingsolver has penned an enduring novel that firmly establishes her as one of America's most intelligent and inventive writing talents. And she will be talking about the book on Tuesday night, Nov. 3, at a long-sold-out show at The Music Hall.

With "The Lacuna," Kingsolver stretches her writing muscles even further than she did in her critically acclaimed novel "The Poisonwood Bible," a mature novelist comfortable in taking the form in different and unexpected directions. There are glimmers of her early novels like "The Bean Tree," in the interesting plots and well-drawn characters, but "The Lacuna" is a significantly more ambitious and ultimately much more enduring work.

Set in both Mexico and the United States during the early to mid-20th century, "The Lacuna" is Shepherd's story. The son of a Mexican-born mother who should never have been a mother and an American father who should never have fathered him, Shepherd is a quiet, almost reclusive man, "a person afraid to be visible," said Kingsolver.

During the course of the brief time of Shepherd's life with us, we come to know the great Mexican muralist and socialist Diego Rivera and his artist wife, Frida Kahlo, who in Kingsolver's capable hands becomes a multidimensional, complex and deeply sensual woman. Shepherd works not only for them but later for exiled Russian Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, a kind, brilliant and damaged human being who Rivera takes in when he runs for his life from Stalin.

We come to learn how the reclusive Shepherd later handles the fame that he engenders after writing one wildly successful novel after another from his adopted home of Asheville, N.C., a fame that puts his Mexican past on direct collision course with investigators from the House UnAmerican Activities Committee.

Woven throughout are real news clippings, actual testimony and true events, all "exactly the way it happened, to the letter," said Kingsolver.

"So much of this plot was already written for me. It's sort of like photography. You already know what you're going to photograph, you just have to figure out where to point the camera and what kind of light to use," she said. "I was as faithful as I could be to the historic record. One might think that makes it easier, but it doesn't. I had to move heaven and earth to put people to where they needed to be. I had to work out the logistics. You know — why would she be there at the same time as this was happening? It gave me a lot of sympathy for film editors."

And it also took an enormous amount of time to research the book, much of the reason it's been so long between novels. But she's hardly kept her pen in her pocket during this past decade; she turned to nonfiction, writing essays and her very successful book on eating local, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle."

All the while, though, the research for "The Lacuna" continued. A lacuna, we learn, is a dark hole, a cave, and it becomes the metaphor that drives the plot. The kernel for the book began with a curiosity.

"I wondered why it is that politics have such a peculiar relationship to the arts in the United States," she said. "Art and politics are considered fairly inseparable in other parts of the world, but why not here? I had a feeling it happened during the McCarthy era, but why would it last 50 years? Why didn't we get over it? What happened in the middle of the 20th century that left us so suspicious of political art? So I dug into the history books, and took an emotional trip through this era.

"After Sept. 11, 2001, the whole country was primed to react fiercely against artists who betrayed any sense of dissident politics. And I came to understand it's bred into us as Americans. We're not just suspicious of political art but of dissidents."

Kingsolver said she begins all her books with theme, "and theme leads to plot and plot leads me to character. I create characters that serve my plot. I back into them, and then spend a whole lot of time getting to know them. I gave birth to my children, but it took quite a while getting to know who they were.

"That's why it takes me a while to write a novel. I write reams and reams of stuff you'll never see, so that the characters will be a consistent personality."

The characters, too, take on a life of their own. Kingsolver said she did not expect Kahlo, for instance, to be a major character in the novel, "but oh my, she was. She really inserted herself. She and Shepherd had a remarkable chemistry. They both suffered greatly, and both had to cope with an enormous, toxic public examination."

As for Trotsky, a too-little known figure, she said, she knew he would appear in some form in her writing ever since she was first introduced to his works when she was 22.

"He IS the lacuna. There are huge holes in what we know about history — in the history of our nation, in the history of our friends. Freud said the most important thing about a person is what we don't know. And that's true of history, too," she said. "Trotsky is an important political spirit and he did an important thing. He tried to make the Soviet Union into a socialist democracy. And he was erased."

"The Lacuna" will be released the same day as Kingsolver's appearance in Portsmouth, Nov. 3.